


Simulacra and Simulations

by unorigelnal (jayburding)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Identity Issues, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2012-04-22
Packaged: 2017-11-04 03:46:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayburding/pseuds/unorigelnal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things aren’t quite right with Robin. Bats won’t talk about it. Time to find out why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Simulacra and Simulations

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been toying around with this idea for a while. I actually write this a couple of months ago and completely forgot about it until I went digging through my cavernous fic folder. Thought it would be mildly appropriate to post, given recent canon revelations. That and if I post the first part, I might actually finish writing it.
> 
> I should probably apologise now for my inability to write Robin’s wordplay. Sorry guys.

“Dude, what the hell?”

Wally slid into view, upside down. “Are you sick? Sleep deprived? Brainwashed? There’s no way Kaldur can put you on your back!”

Dick blinked at his incredulous teammate and levered himself up. His arms wobbled, aching from exertion.

“Well, he did.”

“But that can’t happen. If I can’t beat you, he’s not allowed!”

“That’s not how it works, KF.”

“Perhaps you should take a break, Robin,” Kaldur cut in before Wally could open his big mouth again. “You are still recovering.”

“I’m fine, Kaldur, really,” Robin said as he stood, though the trembling in his limbs gave him away.

“Rest,” Kaldur repeated, “pushing until you collapse will do more harm than good.”

“Not asterous,” he muttered, but obliged, clearing the mat for whoever wanted to go next. His legs shook, but he forced himself to walk straight. Just because Kaldur was right didn’t mean Robin should give him more fuel for his worries. He’d never get them off his back if he keeled over during training.

+

Batman would not tell him what had happened after Joker had caught him.

It was a subject Dick had learned not to touch, after the first snarled reprimands to let it be, but the itch of curiosity was becoming an obsessive craving to know what was in the files hidden behind an encryption even he couldn’t break. 

He’d been hurt. He’d been captured. He’d been handed over to Cadmus at some stage. (Dick had no idea how they’d convinced the Joker to hand him over, but they had. Payoff? Unlikely, but not impossible.) He’d been rescued after three months missing, locked in a tube with no memory of the intervening time period.

The Joker had him, then Batman was staring at him through the glass of the tank, shock written in the slack lines of his face. There was no blank, no missing piece: the memories were sewn one to the other as if a space could not exist there.

He had not forgotten. It just wasn’t there.

It wasn’t comforting.

+

He took a spill during patrol. Not even a fight, just a clumsy dismount from the rooftop: he had a bruised shoulder and ego to show for it. Stupid, but not life threatening. Alfred could have taken care of it, if Bruce hadn’t seemed to have convinced himself that a sore shoulder was actually something much worse, like a labral tear.

Dick could have told him otherwise immediately, purely based on the pain level, but there was no arguing with Bat paranoia, especially recently, so he just assented to the trip downtown to see Leslie.

The pain was down to a cure-it-with-ibuprofen level by the time Leslie came back with the X-rays. He didn’t need to see them to know what she’d found.

“See? I told Bruce I’d have known a busted ligament as soon as it happened. You always remember the feel of a break. Definitely not asterous, but they come with the territory. Never broken a leg, but I’ve done my arms a couple of times, that shoulder at least once, and snapped a few ribs along the way. Mainly because people keep stamping on me. I’m not sure why they do that…”

He trailed off in the face of Leslie’s bemused expression.

“What? I didn’t do the ligament, did I?”

“Your shoulder’s fine, Dick. No sign of tears or breaks. No signs of old breaks either though, on your shoulder or your arm.”

He couldn’t help but stare. “That can’t be right… Even without Robin, I’ve had spills during training. I remember them. I broke my arm practising the quadruple somersault: in a cast for six weeks, therapy for three months. I remember it. You were the one who fixed me up.”

Leslie looked distinctly uncomfortable now. It was not an expression that put him at ease. “I know I did, but there’s no sign of it. Your bones are in perfect shape. As far as I can tell, Dick, you’ve never broken a bone in your life.”

He didn’t have an answer. It couldn’t be right. The word “Cadmus” swam to the front of his mind and refused to be dismissed. Could they have done something to him?

“Thanks, Leslie…” He pulled his shirt back on, unaccountably relieved when he was covered. It wasn’t his costume, but it felt like armour regardless.

Bruce didn’t say a word on the ride home, but he was poised as if waiting for Dick to ask. Dick didn’t dare.

When he got home he went straight to his room, made sure to lock the door, stripped off and checked himself in the mirror.

No scars.

He’d noticed before with the big ones, but he’d assumed it was a product of being in the tube. Something in the water.

Scars were one thing though. Bones were entirely another.

He didn’t know what to think of it, but it couldn’t be good.

+

Everything was fine, except that it wasn’t. Something was happening, had happened to him, and he didn’t know what it was. No one else saw it, or maybe they did, and wouldn’t tell him. Batman acted oddly, Alfred flinched at nothing, and watched him with the strangest expression when he thought Dick couldn’t see him. He almost got away with it, but Dick knew there was something wrong now, and every gaze felt like it burnt him when it so much as glanced off him.

He knew Alfred was watching him, like Bruce was watching him, like the Justice League members watched him when he passed through the Watchtower, like Young Justice watched him when he was at HQ, even more so when he tried to avoid their eyes.

They acted like he was hiding something. They were the ones who were hiding. Whatever had happened to him, they didn’t want him to know. He did though, even if the details were still encoded on a database, and hidden between the stitches holding his memories together. Something was there; something important. Epiphany was hidden in the space that shouldn’t exist.

He was physically perfect, but that couldn’t be right. He was still weaker than he’d been in years, and three months that didn’t exist couldn’t account for muscles as weak as a newborn’s.

He knew everything he’d ever known, but had no muscle memory to back it up, and none of the stamina he needed to keep up. Conner could put him on his back in training, because he remembered moves he couldn’t complete, and tired too fast to be effective. He was skilled in his head, but clumsy in practice.

He couldn’t make Batman smile anymore. That was the worst of it. He read Bruce as well as he ever had, but the man didn’t respond anymore. There was less Bruce every day, more Batman. Dick felt like he was handling crystal every time they spoke, tiptoeing across glasses set bowl to bowl. No tightrope had ever been this precarious.

No amount of platitudes regarding “recovery” could account for what was wrong with him.

Dick couldn’t break the encryption on Batman’s private files, though the need to know was starting to keep him up at night with the way it constantly gnawed at him. He couldn’t ask Batman what had happened anymore than he could ask why Bruce couldn’t smile at him anymore. No one did wilful ignorance better than Batman.

He couldn’t ask. He wouldn’t be told. But there were ways of finding information. He was trained to work with very little info. He enough to work with.

Follow the trail all the way back to the start and what did he find?

All roads led back to Cadmus.

He’d start there.

+

Batman had done a number on the room Dick had been kept in. Almost as bad as the state they’d left Superboy’s room in when the fledgling Young Justice had rescued him. The room was trashed, the case broken, despite the thickness of the glass.

The computer terminal was still functional though, if only just. It was unlikely Batman had left anything for him to find, but he had to look.

It took all of ten seconds to break through what remained of the security, but it proved disappointing. The console was stripped of everything but the very basics: the code required to run the tank was still there, but all information on the subject had been removed. He knew it was the most likely outcome, but it still frustrated him.

He searched the room, and came up with very little else. Signs of a struggle, as if that wasn’t obvious, an abandoned batarang that he almost pocketed, until he realised that Bruce was guaranteed to find it and could probably tell where he’d been based on it alone.

Now that he was here, he wasn’t sure what he had hoped to find. It was a battle scene under dust. Any answers had already been scoured away, by Batman or Cadmus. Either way, the trail was cold.

Dick paused in front of the tube that had held him, staring at the broken edges of the glass. He couldn’t remember Batman deleting the information from the console, but that didn’t guarantee anything. The whole thing was something of a blur.

_He hadn’t dreamt at all. Dick closed his eyes on the flashing grin of the Joker and opened them to the sharp sting of liquid. He snapped his eyes shut again, recognised that he was completely under water, and fought his instinct to panic as he came fully awake._

_There was a tube in his throat, a ventilator. How long had he been underwater?_

_The water had drained away while he tried not to choke. He opened his eyes again when his head was free, blinking until the sting faded. It took a while before the world was anything other than a watercolour._

_Glass around him, closer than he’d expected. A container. Details began to swim into view, beginning with the dark shape coalescing just beyond the glass._

_Batman._

_He tried to say it, automatically, and choke around the tube feeding him oxygen. Panic caught him, which only made it worse._

_The sound of breaking glass was oddly muffled, faraway, but the hands on his face, even with the gloves, were so real it was painful._

_Removing the ventilator was a blurred, raw procession of minutes, until he was gasping desperately for real air, bent nearly double over the arm Batman had around him. If he’d been restrained, he couldn’t recall, but by the time he was cognizant enough to think of that, Batman already had him free of the container._

_It took him far too long to realise his uniform was gone, and embarrassment took longer to kick in. Batman dropped his cape around Dick’s shoulders and he pulled it tight, dragging the edge up until it covered his head. Everything was overwhelming him as his senses all started kicking in again: too loud, too bright, too sharp. Too much._

_His eyes tight shut, and stinging again for a completely different reason, he clung to the cape as Batman swept him up and out of there. He was aware of very little other than Batman’s arms around him as they escaped._

_Free, he fell asleep to the familiar purr of the Batmobile, still swathed in Batman’s cape, and hadn’t woken again for three days._

Dick returned to the console and looked again. He had to have missed something; there had to be something there that could at least give him a direction that didn’t lead back to Batman, or on to searching out the rest of Cadmus just to get his answers. It was too big an operation: he’d never manage on his own.

The code could tell him nothing. It was modelled on the same code he had seen in the console in the room that had contained Superboy: basic instructions for sustaining optimal conditions within the pod while maintaining pod integrity.

Something about it niggled, but he couldn’t see what it was.

The tube itself was little different either, except that the seals were watertight, which had been unnecessary for Superboy.

Begged the question: why had he been kept in liquid? It somewhat reduced his ability to help himself, but given he must have been kept heavily sedated if they’d had him on a ventilator, that could hardly be the reason.

_It’s like a womb,_ pointed out that niggling voice in his head.

Same chamber as Superboy. Same process?

The word “clone” floated to the forefront of his mind and wouldn’t leave.


End file.
